Michael Caine, as a butler or not, has done it

Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne, left, and Michael Caine as Alfred in a scene for “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Michael Caine was doing the eye thing. It’s a trick of his, developed over years of film performances and close-ups: Let your gaze rest on your scene partner, but only with one eye. The other eye, the one closest to the camera, can connect with the lens. The camera “will not miss anything,” he said, “including the bad. So you have to watch it.”

Of course there is little bad when Caine, 79, is on screen. In more than six decades of work he has been a sterling presence — even in less-than-sterling films — inimitable except that so many have tried. In the BBC series “The Trip” the comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon do a riff on his Cockney accent and measured delivery that is as hysterical as it is accurate.

Caine is asking for it, though: In 1987 he led an acting workshop for the BBC that has since become a touchstone for performers, absorbed by everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Jim Carrey. It contains one of the Caine-iest — which is to say the simplest — bits of acting wisdom, a surefire path to a heightened dramatic moment: Do. Not. Blink.

“Not blinking,” Caine said, “is strength. If you want to be weak or funny, blink.”

“I think I blinked twice during this interview,” he added, jokingly, sitting in a private room in the Four Seasons restaurant before a recent luncheon in honor of “The Dark Knight Rises,” the final installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman series. As Alfred, the loyal butler and father figure to Bruce Wayne, Caine has served as a conscience and a consigliere, shepherding and humanizing the hero, played with chiseled — unblinking — intensity by Christian Bale.

It was a part he quickly accepted at the start of the franchise, Caine said, when Nolan turned up at the door of his home in England one Sunday morning, carrying an early copy of the script for “Batman Begins,” the 2005 kickoff to the series, and demanding, for secrecy’s sake, that Caine read it on the spot. “He had written great parts for real actors,” Caine said, “rather than ciphers who are in big special-effects movies, because they haven’t gotten enough money to pay any actors.”

Still, Caine invented his own back story for Alfred. “I thought, I wanted to be the toughest butler in the world,” he said. Alfred, he envisioned, was part of a British military force, the Special Air Service, like the Navy SEALs. “He was a sergeant in it,” Caine said. “He got wounded. He didn’t want to go to civilian life. Then he went into the sergeant’s mess and ran that, which is where Batman met him. I needed him to have social skills, like making cocktails and serving things. So that’s why I put him in the bar, as a wounded ex-soldier who didn’t want to go back into civvy life.” (In Caine’s vision Alfred taught Bruce Wayne lots of things, including how to make a mean martini.)

Nolan and Caine have now worked together five times. Caine appeared in “Inception” and “The Prestige,” also opposite Bale. Warner Bros., the studio behind “The Dark Knight” series, is hoping that their director-actor rapport will help sell the film to Oscar voters, who don’t tend to go in for blockbuster sequels but are often swept away by nuanced performances by older character actors. (Caine is a six-time Oscar nominee and two-time winner, as best supporting actor, for “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “The Cider House Rules.” Nolan has been nominated thrice, for “Inception” and “Memento,” but never won.)

Caine heaped praise on Nolan, a friend whom he said he’d scarcely seen since the killings in Aurora, Colo., on the opening night of “The Dark Knight Rises.” He called him one of cinema’s greatest directors, comparing him to David Lean. Nolan, he said, even had a leg up on that “Lawrence of Arabia” filmmaker because he was also a screenwriter. The crowd at the lunch, replete with members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, seemed impressed.

For his part Nolan heaped the praise right back. “I think being able to say, ‘my great friend Sir Michael Caine’ is one of the great pleasures of my life,” he said, adding that Caine’s reputation was the inverse of the old Will Rogers line: “He never met a man who didn’t like him.”

“Or a woman!” came the shout.

True enough: Caine’s breakthrough role, as the titular playboy in the 1966 film “Alfie,” was once not far from reality, though he has been married for nearly 40 years to Shakira Baksh, a woman he famously fell for after seeing her in a commercial for Maxwell House coffee. Upon his arrival in Hollywood he was welcomed by Shirley MacLaine (with whom he starred in his first American film, “Gambit,” in 1966), Gloria Swanson and Frank Sinatra, and rolled through 1960s London with Warren Beatty, chatting up the likes of Candice Bergen. Caine is working on a documentary of this period with Simon Fuller, the British TV producer. His early years serve as constant fodder.

“I’ll tell you how bad it was,” he said of his childhood in a rough part of London. “The best thing that happened to me was the Second World War, because I was evacuated to a farm in the country.”

Caine, who was knighted in 2000, is a noted raconteur; he has written two well-received autobiographies, “Elephant to Hollywood” in 2010 and “What’s It All About?” in 1992.

“He’s the best storyteller that I’ve ever met,” said Lasse Hallstrom, who directed Caine — with an American accent — in “The Cider House Rules.” As an actor, “I think he goes by instinct,” Hallstrom added. “After all, he grew up a working-class guy. There’s nothing pretentious about him or emotionally false. He’s a natural.”

Caine, though, considers himself a Method actor — he based his accent as Alfred on his own army sergeant — and abides by Konstantin Stanislavsky’s maxim that “the rehearsals are the work; the performance is the relaxation,” as Caine puts it.

“Before I ever say a line in front of a camera,” he said, “I’ve said it a thousand times. So if you give me the cue anywhere, I would just answer you quite naturally.”

His choice of movies, after a half-century as a star, is guided by a few criteria, like whether his grandchildren can see them and whether they are a creative challenge — anything that’s a stretch for “the son of a Cockney Billingsgate fish-market porter,” he said, adding gleefully: “For $10 million I’ll do a movie. But nobody’s offered me that yet. I look at email every morning to see.”